Trust to make better use of school lands worth a try

Much of Aliiolani Elementary School has changed in the million years since I rambled from classroom to auditorium, library, cafeteria and points in between.

Gone are the stilt-raised wooden buildings with tall, double-hung windows through which I pitched a nasty piece of charred breadfruit Mrs. Johnson had prepared and demanded her students eat.

Window seats were prime real estate in her view and as punishment I was moved to the middle row, in front where she could glare at me directly.

The cafeteria, which was really just a big kitchen, is also gone. There was no place to eat there anyway. Kids would line up to take plates of food from slots above narrow counters, balancing cartons of milk on the edges, and slog back to their classrooms to tuck in at their desks.

On particularly windy days, the school yard would be littered with blown-away toast, buns or whatever was the rice-substitute carb on the menu. Every day, without fail, someone would stumble and deposit servings of beef niblets or “creole macaroni” on the ground, an irritation for the janitor, a delight for stray dogs and cats.

In the classroom, what morsels we dared leave uneaten (“Children in China are starving!” Mrs. Johnson shrilled at us daily) was scrapped into gallon-size tomato sauce cans set on old newspapers.

Forks were collected in another and plates piled into stacks kiddie hands could manage. Then the week’s designated slop patrol carried everything back to the cafeteria. 

Rain made for sodden scoops of corned beef hash, runny pickled beets and damp children, but that’s how schools were set out at the time, slapped up as fast as possible as baby boomers overflowed the public education system.

They were mostly one-story buildings sprawling across broad pieces of land, with lots of grass, shady trees and hibiscus and crown flower and tiare bushes, what state Sen. Jill Tokuda described last week as “plantation-style campuses.”

The context of her remarks was discussion of an idea lawmakers are considering to capitalize on “underutilized” public school properties by creating a trust to lease such land for commercial projects.

Talk has been focused on so-called “workforce housing” and health clinics, an effort to blunt apprehension that land would go to luxury homes, ritzy retail development or even tourism-related projects since the fundamental goal, of course, is to raise revenue

People who live near schools with dwindling enrollment are concerned because smaller schools have been targets for closing in recent years and they are unsure of rules that would be put in place and the effects on their neighborhoods. Their anxieties are validated by the Legislature’s creation of the Public Land Development Corp. that largely exempted projects from environmental, building and zoning requirements. That endeavor has been suspended because of fierce public opposition.

There is, however, reason to test the school property idea with a pilot project, but legislation should be absolutely firm about the revenue going only to public school restoration and modernization, and not to fill some budget gap or to pay for other schemes politicians are inclined to dream up.

Schools need not be as sprawling as many now are; compact facilities could be more efficient. Still, there should always be ample spaces for education and expansion as demographics change, for places to play and maybe for cafeterias sheltered from the whimsies of wind and rain.

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Cynthia Oi can be reached at coi@staradvertiser.com.